Masking personal data before it is stored

Feedback is full of personal details. People sign their tickets, paste their phone numbers and mention their colleagues by name. None of that helps you decide what to build, so Meridel removes it before anything is written to disk.

What is masked

Before a message is stored, we replace:

• email addresses and phone numbers, with [email] and [phone];
• personal names that we can recognise, with [name];
• long numbers that look like account or card numbers, with [number].

The original stays in your help desk or survey tool, where it already was. Meridel keeps a link to it, not a copy.

How it works

Masking runs in two passes. The first uses patterns for things with a fixed shape, such as name@example.com or +00 000 000 000. The second uses a small language model, run on our own servers, to find names in running text. Neither pass sends your data to a third party.

What it does not catch

No masking is perfect. Unusual names, names that are also ordinary words, and details written out in full (“my number is oh-six…”) can slip through. That is why every workspace can also:

1. add its own words to always mask, such as internal project names;
2. delete any message, which removes it everywhere in Meridel within an hour;
3. choose where the workspace is hosted.

If you find something that should have been masked, let us know. Every report makes the next pass better.